Alpaca holds the real shares behind most tokenized stocks

Alpaca, a California-based broker-dealer, holds 85.8% of the underlying shares behind tokenized stocks as their custodian, according to a figure circulating on X. That matters now because tokenized stocks are drawing major exchanges and brokerages into the market. Binance, Robinhood and Coinbase all count among Alpaca’s clients. When that many big names lean on one back office, the back office starts to look like critical infrastructure.

The numbers behind the dominance

Data from Token Terminal put Alpaca’s slice at 83.5% of tokenized stock market capitalization as of October 2026.

Alpaca’s own number was bigger. In a self-report from July 2026, the company claimed roughly 94% of the tokenized US stocks and ETFs market, backed by more than $1.5 billion in real shares.

Its client roster spans Ondo, xStocks, Binance, Robinhood and Coinbase. The tokenized products it supports include Binance bStocks. In total, the company says it services more than 10 issuers and platforms.

The work goes beyond storage. Alpaca handles real-time minting and redemption, meaning it helps create new tokens when buyers show up and retire them when holders cash out. It also processes corporate actions, the dividends, splits and other events that real shareholders experience and token holders expect to mirror.

From brokerage API to tokenization backbone

Alpaca Securities LLC, often called Alpaca or Alpaca Markets, was founded in 2015 in California. It operates as a self-clearing broker-dealer, which means it settles its own trades rather than outsourcing that job to a third party.

That self-clearing setup helps explain how it ended up here. A company that already controls brokerage, custody and settlement in-house can offer tokenization as one more layer on top. Alpaca packages that layer as its Instant Tokenization Network, or ITN.

In July 2026, Alpaca raised $135M in equity financing led by Peak XV. The round brought its total capital raised to $435 million.

What this means for the tokenized stock market

For traders, Alpaca’s position is a quiet reassurance and a quiet risk at the same time. The reassurance: tokens from several major platforms trace back to real shares held by a regulated broker-dealer, not a vague promise. The appeal of tokenized stocks rests on that link between the onchain token and the offchain share.

The risk is concentration. When one custodian backs the large majority of a market, any operational hiccup, compliance problem or outage at that firm could ripple across many platforms at once. Users trading on Binance, Robinhood and Coinbase might think they are spreading their exposure. Underneath, much of it may lead back to the same custodian.

The gap between Alpaca’s 94% self-reported figure and Token Terminal’s 83.5% reading is also worth tracking. It could reflect different methodologies, different dates, or competitors winning some business.

For issuers, the calculus is practical. Building custody, settlement and corporate-action handling from scratch is expensive and slow. Plugging into a provider that already serves Ondo, xStocks and the major exchanges is the path of least resistance, which tends to reinforce whoever is already on top.

With $435 million raised and more than 10 issuers and platforms on its books, Alpaca is positioned to keep benefiting from demand for tokenized equities. The key questions are whether rival custodians can chip away at its share, and whether regulators start paying closer attention to how much of this market rests on a single provider.